Amid the unknown perils we face as our entire economic system teeters on the edge of the abyss, it was perversely comforting to see President Bush fall back on his old familiar tricks during his address to the nation last night, engaging the strategy that has always been a winner for him:

Fear... more fear.

This adminstration has learned - with its Iraq War authorization, the Patriot Act, and its seedy telecom snooping schemes - that the best way to get Congress and the American people to fall into line is scare them half to death. More stick, less carrot.

Using words and phrases like "entire economy is in danger", "long and painful recession" and "panic" might just have unintended consequences - like bank runs and true financial panics - as noted by Chris Matthews in the MSNBC wrap-up.

But the Administration wants to fast-track its proposed bailout package as it did the specious Patriot Act following 9/11, and that means screaming "boo" until Congress folds and gives the White House everything it wants. And now! As in... tomorrow!

Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted a lot of juice in that $700 billion package, and all the catches were skewed his way. As originally put to Congress, Paulson would have total control over spending, no oversight from any branch of government and no second-guessing by a troublesome judicial system that insists on splitting hairs over silly frivolity like "laws" and "justice".

Bush has been persona non presenta since the market tumbled 10 days ago, evidently hiding his head in an Oval Office shithouse and hoping no one would remember this oozing economic wound was allowed to cancre on his watch. But he came roaring back last night when lawmakers balked at handing Paulson the keys to the national cash register. It seems one of the sticklers making Capitol Hill nervous was Paulson's insistence on using tax money to honor the platinum parachutes errant CEO's had stipulated in their contracts.

So... American taxpayers pay out huge severance bonuses for the same greedy bastards who got us into this mess. No wonder Congress had second thoughts. At some point, these senators and representatives must go home and undergo that quaint, colloquial custom of re-election. And this time, the churlish peasants are lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks over this neglected mess.

Much of the bad paper in the credit industry will be blamed on borrowers, we know that. They will be pronounced guilty simply because they have no means to defend themselves. They are the faceless Everyman and Everywoman out there, struggling to make ends meet, unrepresented by high-priced oily lobbyists, and utterly alien to any kind of sympathetic press.

But the system, beginning a quarter of a century ago, was rigged against them. Adjustable interest rates - an absurdly corrupt concept to begin with - were designed to drain every last dollar from workaday Americans when they had the temerity to buy with credit a roof over their heads. As the bubble was filling, banks and creditors were unconcerned about inevitable defaults - they soaked the suckers for all the money they had, and then retained the foreclosed property to sell again, to the next Gomer dreaming the American Dream.

It may come as a shock to remote elites like Paulson that ordinary Joes and Joans, seeing their retirements and savings imperiled by the financial collapse, may not be sanguine about rewarding the very engineers of our colossal, international Ponzi scheme.

He and his ilk live in that faraway, bizarre Carly Fiorina World, where Boomer CEOs expect $21 million firing bonuses when they flare out in a top spot.

Firing bonus. Try explaining that inherent contradiction to your long-ago grandparents... who believed in those out-of-date ideas like honesty and fairness.

 

What if a strutting, tinpot bully delivered a swan song - and nobody gave a damn?

Since American mainstream media apparently has surrendered all pretense of integrity and compentence, we're left to peruse the overseas press for reasonably unfiltered summary of reality surrounding us - and a good example is The Independent's raw reporting of George W. Bush's last speech to the United Nations yesterday:

"President Bush did not miss the opportunity while at the podium, however, to criticise Russia for its August invasion of Georgia, remarks that prompted Russia's Foreign Minister (and former ambassador to the UN) Sergei Lavrov to exchange what looked like a joke with a colleague seated beside him."

If their feeling all shook up by all our tough talk, they're sure not showing it - even witnessing Bush's petulant page-flipping of his script. Try finding that in an American wrap-up of the speech.

American prestige around the world has fallen faster than our financial viability during Bush's long, dreadful terms, and nobody knows that better than UN representatives. They'll long remember Colin Powell's dog-and-pony show in 2003 to sell our proposed Grand Crusade in Mesopotamia.

Other than a handful of paid-off, flunky "allies", the world wisely ignored our call back then. With the Just War just a mess in Iraq, and our hand out seeking a cash cure-all for our financiers' naked greed, the U.S. looks not so much like a formidable imperator as a stumblebum pie-fight loser in a two-reel silent comedy. UN representatives are well-aware that the wreckage wrought by our profligate Wall Street whiz-kids may just pitch every nation into poverty.
 
In our pivotal crises of the past - the Revolution that created us, the Civil War, the Great Depression, our participation in World War II - this country was guided by men made great by the perils of the emergencies threatening the nation. For 9/11, we had George W. Bush. ...How fallen the mighty.

Backing him up for most of his era has been a Congress dominated by a Republican Party itself mesmerized by a neoconservative cabal that had promised an all-persuasive intellectual dimension to American conservatism. For a quarter of a century, this bizarre political subcategory changed the face of the Right from one of limited government to one endorsing Big Federalism with a mission.

This paralled an absurd "free market" quakery of non-regulation that allowed the American financial industry to be self-policing - since the blinkered dogma held that such unemcumbered markets were "self-correcting". With greed as its only restraint, such a system was guaranteed to fail... spectacularly. The "self-correcting" really meant "taxpayer-correcting" all along. Quoting Nancy Pelosi, we are trapped by our self-fabricated system of privatized profits and socialized losses. Business risk carries no healthy admonition if government is standing by to rescue corporate disaster; unyielding avarice is free to flourish and infect with vigor. Despite every argument the Right can make, deregulation DID play its part in this mess. Government should protect the public from overweening financial piggishness as much as from thieves on streetcorners. That prattle about a market freed of regulation automatically “correcting” itself is garbage. Unchecked greed fuels violent monetary adjustments that grind to paste the most vulnerable among us.

We discovered that too late. As we did with our Persian Gulf follies.

Neoconservatives gave us a foreign policy that lashed the country to priorities not in its best interest. Its blood and treasure have been contracted out and thrown away to serve the interests of the oil industry, Zionists and dreamers of imperial dreams.

Again... catastrophe.

So when the most prominent front man of this counterintuitive, deceitful quasi-religion takes his bow on the world stage - can anyone be surprised there wasn't at least one rotten tomato hurled into the proceedings?

Or maybe the Russians know better: Laughter is the best medicine.

The uneasiness with which many Democrats have received Sen. Joe Biden’s nomination as vice president doesn’t involve Biden’s tendency to shoot himself in the foot as much as it does their confusion over exactly where those well-heeled feet stand.

There’s been a teacup-tempest in the past news cycle over Biden’s bashing of a Democratic Party ad that called Republican hopeful John McCain “out of touch” to the point of being computer illiterate and generally unfunky. Biden told CBS anchor Katie Couric last night that he considered the ad “terrible.”

"I didn't know we did it, and if I'd had anything to do with it, we would have never done it," Biden said.

When the McCain campaign – of course – used Biden’s gaping insipidity to aim a broadside at Barack Obama in general and his campaign ads in particular, Biden tried to backtrack. But, like Hippocrates’ oath for physicians, explanations for political stumbles should first do no harm:

“I was asked about an ad I’d never seen, reacting merely to press reports,” Biden was quoted as saying. And remember… this is a squabble over a candidate’s detachment from all things current.

There had been nervous mutters about Biden’s long tenure as a “loose cannon”, always ready to shoot off his mouth and then cool down the breeches with the cool unguent of embarrassed foot-pedaling. In his own Presidential bid during the party’s primary-go-round last year, Biden memorably jackassed himself in a reference to his future running mate, as noted by Chris Cilizza:

“On the day he formally announced his candidacy, a New York Observer story that quoted Biden as calling Obama ‘articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy’ came out, and the resultant uproar effectively undercut any momentum Biden was hoping to build.”

Well… at least Biden didn’t pat him on the head and deny Obama is "uppity".

And there’s another worrisome facet to Biden... his arrogance.

Other than a vague awareness of the Delaware Senator as a chronic also-ran Presidential candidate (whose numerous runs were turning him into a kind of Democratic version of the “always-a-bridesmaid” Harold Stassen), I had no opinion of him one way or another until Senate testimony in 1998 on Saddam’s see-saw game with IAEA nuclear inspectors. In a hearing over whether Iraq’s off- limits site designations could hide a viable weapons program, longtime inspector Scott Ritter affirmed it could to the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.

That’s when Biden ripped into Ritter, trying nothing less than to shame the inspector into silence:

“Biden suggested that the question of taking the nation to war was a responsibility ‘slightly beyond your pay grade. That's why they (who make such decisions) get paid big bucks.  That's why they get their limos  and you don't.’  Biden advised that Albright had more to consider than ‘whether old Scotty-boy didn't get in’ to a suspected weapons site. He said that the question of the use of force was the kind of decision that people like Colin Powell and George Bush made, saying that it was a very complicated decision, repeating, ‘It's above your pay grade.’"

That's why they get their limos and you don't. Wow…

Ritter basically was doing his job – being relentless in the search for any hint of a Saddam bomb. When he became convinced that Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs ended with the first Gulf War in the early ’90, Ritter was one of the first sources with any authority to oppose the war in Iraq - long before the 2003 invasion - and has remained a powerful critic of our New Imperium in the Mideast ever since.

Look over Biden’s words again, and remember that he’s aiming them at a countryman, at a conscientious American operative trying to keep us safe. And now… remember, he could be a heartbeat away from the top spot in America.

Biden came to his “working-class” base the hard way: He fell there. His family, once prosperous, lost its wealth. As a Senator, his expensive suits and first-class demands take on an almost defiant edge, as if he considers himself a prodigal grandee eager to assert his return to the plush life, strutting in what he considers the finery of deserved status.

Politically, his actions on the Hill haven't exactly indicated he’s a “man of the people” – unless those people occupy the offices and boardrooms of corporate, financial America. His legislation helped lay the groundwork for Delaware to become a center of our now-debased credit industry, by removing limits on interest rate unsecured lenders could charge.

Also, along with Joe Lieberman and some other “practical” Democrats, he helped limit bankruptcy relief for debtors suckered by adjustable rates that could quickly wipe out their ability to pay. For all the blame rightfully shouldered by the GOP for setting up the credit industry as Loanshark, Inc.,  Democrats like Biden played their part, sometimes by contributing mere inaction.

As “In Debt We Trust” filmmaker Danny Schechter once noted:

“They call Joe Biden ‘the senator from MBNA,’ because he's from the state of Delaware, which is one of the two states that has given very low tax rates to all these credit card companies, and unlimited opportunities for them to operate out of the state on a national basis.”

On top of that, Biden is one of the most combative of Beltway chickenhawks when it comes to baiting Russia, throwing his lot solidly with any and all “interests” pushing to re-energize the Cold War. He has made mealy-mouthed on-again, off-again critiques of the Iraq War, but mostly on tactics – never admitting the obvious conclusion that the war was just about the stupidest move this country ever made. Can’t, really – he voted for its authorization. And he remains a fan of splitting up the volatile country.

Biden can be reduced to the simplest exponent on other roiling Mideastern issues: As he told Israel’s Shalom TV last year, “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” Same old business, same old stand - and, no, he won't be inviting Palestinian contingents to Wilmington Labor Day cook-outs any time soon.

The Obama campaign is found of saying Biden has populist appeal, but his brand of “populism” seems more than content to let the bulk of this country’s population unrepresented by well-connected lobbyists eat cake.

 

For those who see Arab nukes hidden under every Mideastern bushel, things must be getting a little... tense.

Despite the fact that Israel's chief underwriter of all things sympathetic and military is in deep financial straits and already trapped in unremitting warfare, there is no letup in perpetual calls for more aggression "over there." A top Israeli military intelligence office over the weekend has alleged that Iran is making headway to build its first bomb. Oh... and Syria is spoiling for a fight.

Meanwhile, letting a little gas out of that particular bag, the IAEA is expressing doubts that Syrian site bombed by the Israelis a year ago was the nuclear reactor it was so loudly claimed to be.

Samples from the site still being scrutinized have shown no evidence of nuclear material, according to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. A report of the IAEA's findings was released today at an agency board meeting in Vienna. Syria allowed the IAEA to visit the site of the alleged "reactor" in June.

After Israeli jets struck the al-Kibar site in September last year, the Bush Administration and pliant American media trumpeted the claim that it was a small nuclear reactor intended by the Syrians to specifically produce bomb-grade plutonium. Syria has always maintained the buildings were low-priority military warehouses.

The mission so perfectly mimicked the famous 1981 air attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor that some observers wondered if the Israelis intended to show the West how easily such an attack could be executed. Israel has been pushing for such an air raid of Iran's nuclear sites, although today's IAEA report remains skeptical of that country's nuclear capabilities.

In an Israeli cabinet meeting Sunday, Gen. Yossi Baidatz, head of military intelligence research, reported:

"Iran is focusing its efforts in enriching uranium and improving the operational capabilities of its centrifuges. It is mastering the necessary technology and now has one-third of what it need to create a bomb."

Military sources in the West have steadfastly poo-poo'd such doomsaying, appraising Iran's bomb-making capacity as still years away.

In a priceless "no shit, Sherlock" moment, Baidatz observed, "The more moderate Arab states are not united in the wish to act against Iran" - which is to say there's a lobby in Arab countries for expanded U.S./Israeli military actions in the region the way a jackhammer is an ingredient for birhday cake.

There have been some seismic shakeups in the U.S. and Israel lately, with markets and prime ministers falling, and our Mideast strategy appearing to shift to Pakistan - already a nuclear power and the target of renewed terror assaults. Camps in both the U.S. and Isael chafing for an Iran attack must feel the window of opportunity closing; there is a note of sweaty desperation in their jeremiads.

Big question: How can we start more wars if our financial cupboards are bare?